MSResNet: Multiscale Residual Network via Self-Supervised Learning for Water-Body Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Driven by the urgent demand for flood monitoring, water resource management and environmental protection, water-body detection in remote sensing imagery has attracted increasing research attention. Deep semantic segmentation networks (DSSNs) have gradually become the mainstream technology used for remote sensing image water-body detection, but two vital problems remain. One problem is that the traditional structure of DSSNs does not consider multiscale and multishape characteristics of water bodies. Another problem is that a large amount of unlabeled data is not fully utilized during the training process, but the unlabeled data often contain meaningful supervision information. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale residual network (MSResNet) that uses self-supervised learning (SSL) for water-body detection. More specifically, our well-designed MSResNet distinguishes water bodies with different scales and shapes and helps retain the detailed boundaries of water bodies. In addition, the optimization of MSResNet with our SSL strategy can improve the stability and universality of the method, and the presented SSL approach can be flexibly extended to practical applications. Extensive experiments on two publicly open datasets, including the 2020 Gaofen Challenge water-body segmentation dataset and the GID dataset, demonstrate that our MSResNet can obviously outperform state-of-the-art deep learning backbones and that our SSL strategy can further improve the water-body detection performance.